The Realities of Consulting

I’d like some advice on becoming an independent consultant.
Since that means, among other things, that a company no
longer pays your benefits, you need insurance, and you
have to itemize your income for taxes, can the pluses
outweigh the headaches associated with keeping track of
every last penny?

—Geoff Rothman Systems Administrator
Lexington, Kentucky

Greg Neilson says: The best
independent consultants have two major strengths: they’re
among the top five to 10 percent of IT people, and they
have excellent people skills. What this means is that
you not only need to be a great performer, you need to
be your own best salesperson.

That means to everyone you come across—IT managers, users,
and peers. I mention the sales aspect right up front because
it can be a big challenge for technical professionals.
Lots of us like to keep to ourselves and let our skills
speak for us. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option for
the independent consultant.

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Speaking of marketing, I think certifications are particularly
useful for selling others on your proven skills. I’ve
come across plenty of IT staffers with lots of reasons
(some good, some not-so-good) why they haven’t and won’t
undertake certification. That might work if you’re an
employee. But as a consultant, you owe it to yourself
to get all the certifications that are relevant to your
chosen specialty. If you’re claiming to be an expert in
these technologies, you need to take the time to prepare
for and pass the exams (and you might even learn some
things you’d forgotten)!

Not only do you need to be an expert in your current
chosen skills, you need to continually “ride the wave,”
turning yourself into an expert in whatever technologies
emerge and become hot over the next 20 to 30 years of
your working life. When we consider that the IBM PC was
invented just 20 years ago, and the rate of change is
increasing rapidly, you can understand why no one really
knows what tools and technologies will be popular next.

Only a few years ago, you might have been well advised
to earn a CNE as your meal ticket far into the future,
but that bubble has burst. That’s not to say there aren’t
plenty of people still making a good living specializing
in NetWare, but I wouldn’t consider it a hot technology.

Anyone in IT needs to follow this dictum, but it’s especially
true for a consultant. Resign yourself (actually, this
should be something you enjoy) to continually keeping
an eye on trends in IT, with an eye to picking your next
skill set—usually by keeping an eye on your existing skills
and knowledge, and how you can build on that.

The paradox is that you also need to get enough hands-on
experience with the newer products to have employers who
want to pay you as an expert. One way to do this is to
become an expert in migrations—for example, if you’re
a NetWare expert, start learning some Windows NT/2000
skills and get some expertise in migrating from one to
the other. This strategy can also work for DBMS products,
or for programming languages as well—many of the original
Java programmers had expertise in C/C++, quickly learned
the differences in the new language, and were soon productive
in Java.

To watch for emerging trends in IT, any good consultant
should keep an eye on one or more weekly industry trade
magazines (Computerworld is one example), as well
as magazines like this one. For example, if you’re a Windows
NT specialist, I’d recommend picking up Linux now and
learning how to integrate it with NT/Win2K networks. If
you have SQL Server experience, consider learning Oracle
as well. And we all need to keep an informed eye on how
WAP (wireless application protocol) users will access
our backend data sources in the future.

I make these suggestions based on what I see into the
immediate future—I encourage you to come to your own conclusions.

My most important piece of advice isn’t what technologies
and certifications to focus on, but the fact that it’s
something you need to evaluate regularly. What skills
are going to be hot tomorrow? How you can learn them?
How marketable are the skills you have now? You don’t
always want to learn the latest and greatest skill, but
neither do you want to be stuck maintaining old COBOL
code at bargain-basement rates.

A future as an independent consultant can be very exciting.
Just make sure you’ve thought everything through before
you start. Good luck!

About the Author

Greg Neilson, MCSE+Internet, MCNE, PCLP, is a Contributing Editor for MCP Magazine and a Professional Development Manager for a large IT services firm in Australia. He’s the author of Lotus Domino Administration in a Nutshell (O’Reilly and Associates, ISBN 1565927176).